Photovoltage generation in enzymatic bio-hybrid architectures
- PDF / 1,638,529 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 432 x 648 pts Page_size
- 119 Downloads / 171 Views
MRS Advances © 2020 Materials Research Society DOI: 10.1557/adv.2019.491
Photovoltage generation in enzymatic bio-hybrid architectures Michele Di Lauro1, Gabriella Buscemi2,3, Michele Bianchi1, Anna De Salvo1,4, Marcello Berto5, Stefano Carli1, Gianluca Maria Farinola2, Luciano Fadiga1,4, Fabio Biscarini1,5 and Massimo Trotta3* 1
Center for Translational Neurophysiology - Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Ferrara, Italy
2 3
CNR-IPCF Istituto per i Processi Chimico Fisici, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Bari, Italy Section of Human Physiology University of Ferrara, Ferrara, Italy - 5Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita, Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy 4
Abstract Most of the photochemical activity of bacterial photosynthetic apparatuses occurs in the reaction center, a transmembrane protein complex which converts photons into chargeseparated states across the membrane with a quantum yield close to unity, fuelling the metabolism of the organism. Integrating the reaction center from the bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides onto electroactive surfaces, it is possible to technologically exploit the efficiency of this natural machinery to generate a photovoltage upon Near Infra-Red illumination, which can be used in electronic architectures working in the electrolytic environment such as electrolyte-gated organic transistors and bio-photonic power cells. Here, photovoltage generation in reaction center-based bio-hybrid architectures is investigated by means of chronopotentiometry, isolating the contribution of the functionalisation layers and defining novel surface functionalization strategies for photovoltage tuning.
INTRODUCTION: Evolution has engineered multi-protein complexes [1] adapted to efficiently convert the solar radiation into chemical energy, sustaining all the energy needs of the life on planet Earth via the photosynthetic process. These multi-protein complexes act as photoenzyme, catalyzing the reduction of oxidized chemical species, performing an energetically “uphill conversion” by using visible light as the sole energy source. The enzymatic molecular machineries of photosynthetic organisms share peculiar common fundamental traits [2] that make higher and lower plants, algae, and some specialized bacteria the sole kind of organisms on the planet able to harvest extra-terrestrial energy
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Texas Libraries, on 07 Jan 2020 at 10:15:24, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1557/adv.2019.491
and store it, functioning as primary producers. Plants, algae, and cyanobacteria perform a complex set of reactions based on the harmonized function of two photosynthetic units, called Photosystems, which eventually oxidize water to molecular oxygen, while photosynthetic anoxygenic bacteria have developed simpler apparatuses based on a single functional unit. The photochemical cores of these photosynthetic apparatuses, called reaction centers (RCs), fuel the met
Data Loading...
